(no subject)

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Federal appeals court blocks state lawsuit over health care reform law

...the three-judge panel concluded Thursday the state lacks the jurisdictional authority to challenge the 2010 law.

A separate lawsuit by private Liberty University also was rejected on similar grounds.

This leaves the question of who the hell does have standing?

The Richmond-based court becomes the second such federal court to uphold the constitutionality of ...

The court ruled on technical grounds, not the larger constitutional questions...

Who is worse, the reporter that writes self-contradicting articles, or the editor who lets it through to print?

I can't put my opinion on here, because I'm asking questions I don't actually know the answer to.

Comments

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

Ultimately this whole ordeal is a matter of construction. Will you agree with the man who wrote the constitution who said if your construction is limitless then you defeat the purpose of enumeration of power, or will you disagree with him and defeat the purpose of enumeration of power? You may think you're being given a false dilemma. You would be wrong. If you use the general welfare clause as a way to construct an argument of going from the general to any particular you please, you have the power to do whatever you please. Why bother enumerating power?

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure that court was simply restating a prohibition on third party standing.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

The court is upholding the constitutionality of a set of laws which for the most part is entirely unconstitutional by any reasonable measure, and all they care about is procedure? Long live the legal system!

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

Yes, a body designed to arbitrate disputes cannot create its own disputes to arbitrate.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

The point was the point is missed.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the standing elements are themselves inherent in the constitutional command that the courts will only hear "cases and controversies." "Cases" turns out to have a very specific meaning, one of the elements of which is a party with standing.

You cannot flout the Constitution to uphold it.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

If the state of Virginia has no standing to challenge the law in court, then the state of Virginia has no vote in the amendment process. The state of Virginia might as well not be a member of the union. What a gigantic pile of bullshit.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

I'm going to presume that when you say "If the state of Virginia has no standing to challenge the law in court, then the state of Virginia has no vote in the amendment process," you mean "this law amounts to an amendment of the Constitution, and barring Virginia from having its say in court bars them from having any say in that amendment process." If that's wrong, ignore my subsequent remarks, but I can't suss any other meaning out of the statement.

From what I've read in the opinion, this case would never have dealt with the constitutionality of the mandate on the standing asserted. Here's why.

Constitutional standing requires three things: injury-in-fact (and certain limited types of speculative injuries), a causal relationship between the injury and the party you are suing, and redressibility, the ability of the court to fix the problem. The court here addressed the injury-in-fact problem directly, as if there is an injury stemming from implementation of the ACA, then the parties named are proper and the remedy is available.

Virginia recognized that the mere existence of the individual mandate did not grant it standing, and so they passed the VHCFA, which purported to free Virginians from any mandates to purchase insurance. As you are so ready to note in other contexts, the Supremacy Clause means that the Constitution and federal law are superordinate to state law, so any "conflict" is illusory - federal law wins.

And they can't sue as parens patriae, for reasons outlined in the opinion which I'm sure you've read thoroughly by now. Again, it's down to supremacy (that clause you love so dearly).

The VHCFA angle killed this case in its cradle, and it should never have gotten the lower court ruling that it did.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

What disconcerts me is you're going on about procedure, which may be all well and good under a certain set of circumstances, or may actually turn out to be very Pharisaic. As far as Virginia is concerned, the only valid reason I see for them having no standing in a lower court is because the lower court does not have original jurisdiction in this matter. Since Virginia is a State, and cases where a State is a party requires the Supreme Court having original jurisdiction, Virginia made the mistake of starting in the lower court where Democrat judges reign.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Ah, so we'll just do away with all procedural concerns where you don't like the law they'd like to challenge? You do realize that you're arguing for an historic expansion of the power of the Supreme Court, right?

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

So wait a minute: let's stop with going down some slippery slope path like you always do. I want to make sure I have this straight: you don't disagree that the constitution makes it pretty damn clear that the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over this matter? Correct me on why I'm wrong if I am.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Jurisdiction is not mandatory. The court *may* exercise jurisdiction, but there is no requirement for any court to exercise its jurisdiction. So they do have jurisdiction, but in practice they only exercise it where two states are opposing parties. So it's moot, since they wouldn't have done so here. And even then, the existence of jurisdiction does not create standing, and Virginia would have the same standing problems in DC as they did in the 4th.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

To add to that: Virginia has the same say in the creation of this law as any other state. It sent two senators and far more congressmen and women to Washington to debate and vote on the measure. It's not like the commonwealth had none sworn to represent them.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

Here's the biggest problem Virginia has against Congress' unconstitutional acts: the 10th amendment makes Virginia's powers of legislation indefinite while our constitution enumerates definite, limited power. While General Welfare and Necessary and Proper scared people in the 18th century before the ratification for good reason, Madison made the obvious argument about what it means to enumerate power, then today we sit around quibbling over why the contradiction should be allowed because of such nonsense like "it's a living document". The State of Virginia passed a law stating no citizen will be required to purchase health insurance, and now the United States is contradicting the State of Virginia over a matter where Virginia technically has the upper hand: namely the 10th amendment. As far as court procedure is concerned, evidently James Madison was never the author of the law.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

So, you're in favor of state nullification?

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

I'm in favor of the United States government obeying the constitution or calling for a constitutional convention to wipe out all of Madison's work. You really think Madison intended such a limitless construction contrary to the 10th amendment?

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Yeah, because procedure is such a terrible thing to have. Order and lawfulness, all this 'following the rules' stuff you have to do. Yech!

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

Procedure has its place except when it's a blatant violation of the law.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not a 'blatant violation of the law', as defined by every legal metric, only by your own personal opinion.

There's hundreds of these cases, probably in every state, of people with actual standing suing against the individual mandate.

But instead you're frothing at the mouth over this one case which was over standing. You can have a rational argument here, this is just not the way to go about it.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

I'm not frothing at the mouth. I'm stating very simply that you can't have General Welfare, Necessary and Proper, and in some instances that Commerce Clause, and get to where we are now while simultaneously having an enumeration of power and a 10th amendment stating what it states. Unless you're willing to accept contradiction in law, and I'm not.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but how you got from there's no contradiction in the constitution, and there isn't from my perspective, to it not being a good document, is purely assumption. I say the constitution is a very good document. It's one of the best documents. What I am saying is the position that the constitution grants Congress power to do so much of what it's done in the health care bill is a contradiction. It's not a contradiction in the language of the text and all of the legitimate textual entailment which exists in the text; it's a contradiction in Congress' exercise of power and the courts' interpretation of the text.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

It's not a contradiction, but whatever. The constitution is not a really good document in general, I'll agree with you that the 10th Amendment is generally interpreted pretty broadly.

However, as it stands it doesn't have this glaring flaw that you imagine it to have. It just doesn't make sense to have a loose confederation of states that govern themselves. It made sense before we could communicate efficiently, because we needed local governments to enact country-wide legislation, but not now. We're not these isolated pockets of communities or cultures anymore.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

I disagree. It makes perfect sense to have the states govern how they build their infrastructure and deal with day-to-day life since they have all of their local matters to deal with. It also makes perfect sense for the federal government to have the power to protect the individual's liberty and life.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

No, I meant in the sense that we have THE USA instead of just a bunch of states that are loosely associated legally.